Most Shared

Why We Must Protest

The man standing in front of me at JFK Airport was holding up a sign that read, “If you are neutral in situations of injustice you have chosen the side of the oppressor.” It’s a Desmond Tutu quote, one that’s been making the rounds these past few weeks, and it was in the spirit of those words that I boarded the subway a few hours earlier, to make my way to the protest against President Trump’s executive order barring entry to the United States by all refugees and citizens from seven Muslim-majority countries. And I was feeling pretty good about that choice—what a sacrifice, I congratulated myself, hijacking my oh-so-pleasant Saturday plans to see the Arthur Jafa show at Gavin Brown's Enterprise before it closes, in favor of standing in the cold with a mass of strangers, chanting. “We are here!” we Terminal 4 demonstrators shouted in unison. “And we are watching!”

I soon encountered several familiar faces at the rally, among them my friend Jeffrey Monteiro, who had driven three hours to JFK from his place upstate. Jeffrey’s parents are Catholics from India; he was raised in Qatar. He recounted to me the interrogation he once received, leaving Big Bend National Park on the border of Mexico in Texas, as a patrol agent queried his background and his passport. Jeffrey is a U.S. citizen. I celebrated with him and his husband, Clayton, the day of his naturalization ceremony. Seeing Jeffrey—and noting, as well, the stream of emails I was receiving from concerned friends here in the process of green card applications, and ones in the U.K. with dual British/Iranian citizenship—I stopped feeling quite so self-congratulatory. There are people for whom participation in politics is no sacrifice, because it’s not a choice. This is the point Black Lives Matter protesters make when they seek to expose the ways politics imposes daily burdens on black people’s lives—the stop and frisk procedures, the environmental racism that leads to situations like lead-contaminated water in Flint, and so on. For many people in America, newly inaugurated into habits of dissent, the necessity of responding to politics in an active way feels like a hardship, a distraction from the mundane life-living we perceive as the proper object of our attention and our time. Meanwhile, many other people in America are saying: Join the club.

Here’s the thing, though. Mundane life-living is the proper object of our attention and our time. That’s all any of us want, really—the freedom to fix our leaky faucets, light candles on our children’s birthday cakes, squabble with our siblings or significant others, punch the clock at our jobs, all without feeling the warping effects of oppression. Our common humanity is best reflected not in our occasional moments of nobility, but in our shared experience of banality.

Ironically, that’s a lesson that was driven home to me by the work of Iranian director Asghar Farhadi, whose new film, The Salesman, is nominated for Best Foreign Film at next month’s Academy Awards. As of now, it seems that Farhadi, due to his nationality, will not be able to travel to the United States to attend the Oscars as a result of President Trump’s executive order. Truly, the world’s gone topsy-turvy. Farhadi films such as About Elly and A Separation are all about normal people—normal people in Iran—trying to do normal people things, like go on vacation, fix up friends, take care of an ailing parent, get a divorce. But they’re also about the way that normalness changes both trajectory and dimension when it’s subsumed into state ideology and the state bureaucracy that enforces it. The fear of the functionary seated behind a desk somewhere, ready at any moment to put a thumb on the scales of your life—this is the subtext of tyranny, and the subject of Farhadi’s work. Any American wondering whether the exhausting effort of protesting is worth it should watch his films now. You may not be a Syrian refugee in doubt of reuniting with your child; the deskbound functionaries may not be concerned with you or your unremarkable life just yet. But eventually—inevitably—they will be.